Meta

Apparently, Feminists Can Only Concentrate On One Thing at a Time

At least, Sarah O’Meara seems to be implying that Feminists are incapable of being worried about more than one thing at a time in her article Give Me Page Three Models Over “Celebrity News” Any Day in the Huffington Post; a newspaper well-known for its refusal to to publish news about “celebrity culture”. Of course, the article is really nothing more than one of those self-serving defences of porn in which anyone who even thinks about the harm caused to individuals within the porn industry and its wider effects on human sexuality in general is immediately anti-sex. We can’t possibly have taken the time to think about how harmful it is for young teenagers to learn about their sexuality and healthy relationships from the pornography freely available on the internet. We can’t possibly have thought about how restrictive the sexuality porn dictates is. We can’t possibly have thought about the how much damage is caused by the rape and torture of vulnerable women’s [and children] bodies. Not only that, we can only concentrate on one thing at a time so either we tackle page 3 OR celebrity culture. But not both.See, oddly, I think that both the Sun’s soft-porn Page 3 and the obsession with celebrities help perpetuate rape culture. They are both part of the pornographication of society; the celebration of vapidity and the objectification of women’s bodies. I think they are destroying our children. I think that the people who buy celebrity magazines are culpable in perpetuating extremely damaging and narrow misogynistic constructions of sex and gender. I think the obsession with reality television, whether it be X-Factor or the Kardashians, serves only to function as nothing more than the 21st century version of the 19th century freak show. They are both harmful.

But, you know what, I can campaign against Page 3 and celebrity culture. At the same time. Shocking, I know. So, when other women write things like this:

However, this tired, out-dated crusade against Page Three comes at a time when the rest of mainstream media is actively conquering and exploiting a far more insidious form of female objectification. …

While feminists feebly fight the Sun, the online titillation monster grows daily, snatching bite-sized chunks of celebrity bikinis from the hands of news publications and serving them up to whomever types ‘Kim Kardashian’ and ‘bikini’ into Google. …

Instead of fretting over the Sun, let’s start being a little more honest about how the media is really warping men’s minds towards women.

I have to wonder about their motivation. Why are they belittling a campaign against objectification in one specific area by claiming that feminists don’t see the harm caused in other areas? I’ve never met a feminist who didn’t think reality TV and celebrity culture were toxic. I’ve never met a feminist who wasn’t campaigning about several things on several fronts ALL at the same time. I find myself increasingly bored by this assumption that feminists are too stupid to do more than one thing at once. This is the kind of misogynistic twaddle I expect from men like Neil Wallis. Not other women.